the highest fall you'll ever grace
by Taywen
Summary: Emily Kaldwin goes to sleep in a room at the top of the Tower at the Hound Pits and wakes up ten years later in the quarters of the Empress in Dunwall Tower. AU, high chaos!Emily.


Disclaimer: Dishonored does not in any way belong to me, it's the property of Arkane Studios, etc.

warnings: this is kind of fucked up? like later on. I think, anyway.

* * *

this was no accident

* * *

Emily dreams of the Void.

The man with dark eyes and that cunning smile watches her sometimes; at first she shouts at him to leave her alone (she can't stand the staring) (how can she even tell if he's looking at her, his eyes are so- _wrong_) but as time passes, she finds that his periodic company is better than wandering this spit of rock alone. No matter how she rails or- eventually- pleads, he doesn't say a word. He comes and goes as he pleases.

There is a painting at the base of the large tree that dominates the floating rock, but the paints have bled downward, leaving no hints as to its subject. Emily is drawn to it anyway; she can spend hours (days) staring at it, tracing her fingers over the now-dry smears of colour. (Later, much later, she will claw her fingers raw trying to destroy the paint.)

Pedestals are arranged at intervals about the rock, but they are empty of any statue as she might have expected. She explores the entirety of her world - less than five hundred paces, even on her child's legs - and quickly grows bored. Another rock, even smaller than this, floats just beyond her reach; a painting (not ruined) lies there, a fanciful, abstract depiction of her world.

She memorizes every inch of the rock, every blade of grass and tiny pebble, the number of steps leading to this altar and the cobblestone path that away leads into nothing.

The dark-eyed man appears when she finds the blade, half-hidden in a patch of tall grass, easily overlooked.

(It wasn't there before, though; she's been over every inch of this isolated place a hundred times, a thousand- he must have left it there, for her to find.)

It is deadly sharp, distinctively cross-hatched on the flat of the blade near the hilt. It is, unsurprisingly, stained with old blood. It isn't as heavy in Emily's hand as she expected; her fingers fit with surprising ease around the hilt and she realizes, with a dull sort of shock, that she has grown. She can reach nearly to the top of the ruined painting, now, as evidenced by the gouges furrowed in the ruined colours; she had to strain before to reach its midpoint when she first woke up here.

_How long has she been here?_ The light never changes and while buoys float by (just beyond reach) and leviathans drift past in the distance, their heavy, mournful music the only sound besides her own footsteps and breaths, she has no way to measure the span of time between one appearance and the next. As far as she can tell, the dark-eyed man's visits- if they can be considered such- have no discernible pattern either.

"The briar ensnared the wolf," the dark-eyed man says, his voice soft- conspiratorial; cool breath ghosts over the shell of her ear. It stirs the long strands of her hair; when she cards her fingers through it, it reaches to her waist. It is the first time she has heard another's voice in- in- "She dulled his claws and tied a noose around his neck and made him sit at her feet."

"How long has it been?" Emily asks, her hand clenching tight around the blade's hilt. She finds the dark-eyed man smiling faintly when she turns to face him.

"Not long enough," he says, "or perhaps far too long. It's difficult to say." He cocks his head, floating back so a respectable distance returns between them. "Come with me." He beckons, and something makes her follow him to the edge of the spit of rock.

"I'm not going to jump," Emily says. She's already tried that; she can't make it, and she always lands right back where she started anyway.

The dark-eyed man crosses his arms, floating several feet away, out in the empty space between the two rocks. He just stares at her.

"You can't make me," Emily says, raising her hands to- ward him off, perhaps. But this reminds her of the sword in her hand, and they both look at it for several moments.

"Can't I?" he asks, slowly, his alien, piercing gaze sliding back to her once more.

"No," Emily says, shifting into a stance that probably doesn't resemble Corvo's at all- but she tries, dredging up memories of watching him drill in the early morning (she used to sneak out just for that) and when he had rescued her from the Golden Cat.

The dark-eyed man smiles then, wide, all teeth. "The briar strangled the crow and used his body to fertilize her roots."

Emily lunges at him, sword out.

She lands on the other rock, the impact jarring up her legs and causing her to lose her grip on the blade; these sensations are very much secondary to the pain searing up her left arm.

Emily screams, clutching at her wrist as her knees buckle. It is over almost as soon as it had begun, and when she looks, a familiar, damning mark is branded into her skin, stark against the pale flesh.

It's the first time she's felt pain in who knows how long (_he_ knows, of course) but she wipes away the tears that had sprung reflexively to her eyes and puts it behind her. It doesn't hurt now, and there's nothing she can do about it.

Her white clothes are streaked with dirt and torn, though not as ill-fitting as she might have thought, when she looks down at herself. Her wrists are skinny, the delicate bones there visibly protruding; even fully unrolled, her sleeves barely reach past her elbows. She dimly remembers discarding her shoes at some point, and she must have gotten rid of her stockings at the same time; her feet are muddy, with dirt encrusted under the nails. Her hands are much the same, with flakes of paint ground into the nail bed.

She picks up the sword in her right hand and stands.

He reappears at her side, an unreadable expression on his face. "I think you already know who I am," he says, taking her left hand between his two large, cool ones, "and what this is."

Emily jerks her hand out of the Outsider's grasp, her skin crawling from the sensation of his pale fingers stroking over his mark. "Of course I do." Her words are just as sharp as the blade in her hand.

* * *

"I don't interfere in your world, but this domain is mine," the Outsider tells her. "I can do what I like in my own realm, surely."

"You do what you like anyway," Emily says, but distractedly. Her eyes rove ceaselessly over the landscape before her, a confusing tumult of brick buildings and metal rails, cobblestone streets that actually _lead_ somewhere. She has not seen anything besides tree and useless marble construction and indecipherable paint for so long.

"I provide the means," the Outsider protests mildly; when she finally tears her gaze away from this strange (but more than welcome) representation of the world, he looks more amused than anything.

Emily looks away again, her hand dropping to the sword at her hip. The Outsider had provided new clothes, more suited to the task he has set before her. Her feet feel strange clad, but she will need to accustom herself to boots and the ground ahead does not look as forgiving as the dirt she has recently known.

(She had shorn her hair herself, hacking at it inexpertly with the blade until it hung around her jaw.

"You should take more care," the Outsider had said, flicking a hand gracefully at the fallen locks strewn across the cobblestones. A breeze had risen then, curling the hair into a ball- and another flick of his wrist had set it alight.

"The brush," Emily had said, recalling the discarded, long-dry palette and brush in the grass beside the painting.

"Just so.")

"Your body will remember how to do everything you learn here," the Outsider says. "You can't die- well, that's not quite right. You won't die permanently."

Emily nods. "I have to find the end, right?"

"As fast as possible," the Outsider agrees. "Using your blink ability should you deem it necessary."

"What do I get in exchange?"

The Outsider cocks his head, studying her in silence for several moments. He flourishes a hand, and a human heart, twisted through with metal and glass, appears in the air above his palm. It beats steadily, the sound strangely soothing. "Would the heart of a living thing suffice?"

She recognizes it, though it seems disproportionately large in the open air; she'd only seen it when Corvo had clutched it in his hand, stalking through the Golden Cat or resting between missions at the Hound Pits Pub. She'd mentioned it to Callista once and the governess had merely looked at her in confusion before dismissing it as one of Emily's pranks.

The other Loyalists had all reacted in similar manners; apparently none of them could see the grisly thing Corvo kept close at hand at all times. She never did ask Corvo about it; like the mark on his hand, the heart had- unnerved her.

She has no such qualms now. "There's only one of those," Emily says, and as she utters the words she knows them to be true.

The Outsider inclines his head. "I suppose fashioning another would be- redundant. But with this, you can find runes and bone charms bearing my mark, which will allow your own powers to grow."

"Such as?"

"Slowing or stopping time, seeing your enemies and useful items, possessing the flesh of another being... among other things."

"Do the others-" the briar and the wolf and the crow, "-have the same powers?"

"For the most part," the Outsider agrees. "Hadn't you better get going? I won't give you this heart until your performance is- satisfactory."

"I'll earn it on the first try."

The Outsider smiles. "I doubt that."

(She doesn't, but she gets better the next time, and keeps improving steadily until the Outsider appears before her again, immaculate to her own dirty, blood-streaked appearance. She had fallen countless times, skinning her knees, her palms, the tender skin of her face high on one cheek. Her hands ache, unused to the work, and her injuries throb in time with the frantic pounding of her heart; reminders that she's alive, that she's moving forward.

Her fingers close around the heart and her mother's voice whispers into her mind and she almost tries to cut into the Outsider again, but it would be useless. He leaves her there, until her tears have dried up and she can stand, and they move to the next test, and the next, and the next.)

* * *

Emily freezes when she finds herself in a familiar, vast chamber, though seen from an unusual angle. The last time she was in the Parliament's hall, she had been a mere nine years old. She doesn't know how much time has passed since then but- years, surely. She no longer has to stand on the tips of her toes to see over the counter.

Her mother sits at the head of the room, flanked by Corvo; the various aristocrats and nobles are arrayed in groups on either side of the room, according to voting blocs and political favour. She can hear their voices, indistinct, a buzz of sound that does not resolve immediately into recognizable words.

"What is this."

The Outsider hovers into view, a dark blur in her peripheral vision. "An Empress must know statecraft," he says, but questioningly. 'Statecraft' must be one of things that he finds utterly dull.

"Statecraft didn't save my mother," Emily says. "And it was hardly a concern for her- _usurper_." She spits the words out, unwilling to taste that traitor's name on her tongue. She still remembers her anger when the Lord Regent's words had blared from the loudspeakers, confessing to everything- the plague, her mother's murder and the subsequent ruin of Emily's entire _life_.

Corvo's solution was too clean, too bloodless- he should have left the former Spymaster to bleed out on the Tower's marble floors. She never got the chance to tell him that, though.

"Stealth and blade work didn't save Corvo," the Outsider says and Emily flinches. She'd been distracting herself from the thought of Corvo by throwing herself wholeheartedly into the Outsider's trials; some part of her had been hoping that the Outsider's oblique reference to him had been a cruel tease. To hear him admit it so bluntly is- painful.

When she shakes off her grief (and her _anger_, Corvo didn't save her- he didn't even save himself) she finds herself in an unknown building. The wooden floorboards are warped by moisture and groan beneath her when she shifts her weight. The glass doors leading out of the room suggest wealth, but the rubble strewn partway across the floor from a collapsed wall speaks differently. A harsh spotlight illuminates the centre of the room, leaving the rest of it in relative darkness; four wooden dummies are set at intervals within the spill of light, and a series of bookshelves and desks enclose the lit area on one side.

What catches her eye, however, is the red-clad figure standing in the centre of the spotlight. The lenses of the vapour mask reflect the light back, making it impossible for Emily to see their eyes- but she wouldn't be able to in any case. She remembers her brief time in the Whalers' custody, and those masks had been utterly impenetrable. The only way she'd had to distinguish them was their voice (which she rarely heard) and the colour of their uniform - grey and blue.

The only one who had worn red was her mother's murderer.

Emily looks around for the Outsider, but he is nowhere in evidence.

"Draw your sword, little Empress," the Whaler orders, his blade rasping from its sheath. She'd heard the murderer speak once, his voice gravelled and heavy; this voice is lighter and- younger, if she's not mistaken.

Emily draws her sword anyway. This is the first time the Outsider has made any of the constructs of the Void actually recognize her. When she was sneaking around in rich, forgettable mansions, the guards and guests had only seen her as a threat; none of them had addressed her as _Empress_.

The Whaler runs her through in a sickening parody of her mother's murder. He's standing impassively in the middle of the floor when Emily resumes consciousness, one hand raised in an aborted motion to her heart.

"Again," the Whaler says, and kills Emily a few seconds later.

* * *

The Outsider rewards her with a single whalebone rune when she finally defeats the Whaler. The training room splinters away, his corpse falling through the gaping floor. She find herself on the same forsaken spit of rock that was her prison, and only the Outsider remains.

Emily turns the rune over in her hands, absently tracing the mark etched upon its face. The heart pounds madly in her pocket. "This will increase my power?"

"Just so." He watches her, as he always does.

"I want-"

She does not know the state of Dunwall, of _her Empire_- but the Whaler had let some things slip. Confirmed Corvo's death, the fall of the previous regime and her own ascension- or rather, the ascension of the one who had _stolen her life_.

What little he had told her only made her angry, and his refusal to elaborate had made her furious. Her fury had made her sloppy, and when he added his own Outsider-granted powers to the mix (bending time and immobilizing her in the same way Corvo had been immobilized) well- she hadn't had much of a chance.

Emily's anger has cooled since then, out of necessity, but it is by no means gone.

"Cleansing fire, perhaps?" The curve of the Outsider's smile is ironic. How many heretics have been burned, Emily wonders, then dismisses the thought.

"I want to learn statecraft," Emily says. She is no longer a child.

The Outsider cocks his head. "It can be arranged." He looks at the rune. "Do you intend to save that?"

Emily looks down as well. Imagines a city burning. It isn't an unwelcome thought.

"I'll call it Wildfire," the Outsider says. "With it, you can convert your mana into flames. With practice, it can have all sorts of applications."

Emily nods, holds the latest rune out. "Then I want that power."

The Outsider touches the mark and the rune disappears. Her mark burns, and instinctive knowledge of how to use her new power floods her mind.

"What you said earlier," Emily says, glancing around for something to ignite. "Am I-"

"-the only one who has this particular power, yes," the Outsider says, leaning forward. "Each of my marked has a unique ability, and this is yours. Use it- wisely." He waves a hand and the environment melts away again. Something in her eases as the spit of rock disappears, replaced by the railcar trial area where she had learned to shoot a pistol.

Emily raises her hand as the first car rumbles into view, brakes screeching as it comes to a shuddering halt in front of her. She backs up to the edge of the ground and ignites the first tank of whale oil that comes sailing out of the railcar.

It sets off a chain reaction, the explosion consuming the other whale tanks one after the other. The flames are a supernatural purple, the smoke acrid and choking against her face; but the warmth, though it borders on blistering, is more than welcome.

* * *

"I'll be leaving soon," Emily says, pacing restlessly before the Outsider. As time passes, the Void is coming to feel less and less- _real_.

The current stage is her room in the tower at the Hound Pits; Callista lies in the doorway, blood leaking upward from her slit throat. If these scenes are to be believed, all of the Loyalists are dead. Emily had only felt a small connection to Callista, and it paled in comparison to her bond with Corvo. Her grief for her mother's Royal Protector has long since bled out; she barely spares Callista a glance.

"Soon," the Outsider echoes, floating above her side of the room, the inky blackness that he exudes drowning out the lamps and curling hungrily over her childish drawings.

"I have some questions."

"I have all the answers, though you may not like them," the Outsider says.

"Who is the Whaler you had train me to fight?" She hasn't seen him in ages, but she can count the number of times one of the Outsider's trials has killed her since then on her fingers.

"A shark in wolf's clothing."

Emily frowns, but pressing the Outsider for detail is a lesson in futility. Now that she can feel her spirit chafing at the Void's confines (a strange, intangible but persistent itch at the very core of her being) she finds herself impatient.

"And what am I?" Emily asks. The wolf is her mother's killer, the crow is Corvo; the briar must be whoever assumed control of her very life, leaving her spirit to haunt the Void (or, more accurately, that tiny, forsaken spit of rock). And her teacher is, apparently, the shark.

"I already had a little white rat," the Outsider says thoughtfully. "Though," he adds slyly, "you are hardly small, nor are you white any longer."

Emily waits; she's waited this long, and she can last these scant minutes while the Outsider mulls her question over. All the same, she can't remain still. Her hand toys briefly with the hilt of her blade, meticulously cleaned some time ago; then she rubs her thumb over the mark, the dark lines slightly raised from the rest of her skin. Her hands have become callused, accustomed to clutching a blade or a pistol, even a grenade in a pinch.

"A hawk, I think," the Outsider decides at length. "With talons sharper than thorns. How long will you fly beyond reach, I wonder?"

"As long as it takes," Emily says.

The Outsider smiles. "Go on, then."

She wakes up.


End file.
